VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 16 2005 - 10:03:35 CST

Yes, adding 3-D texturing the the external renderers is tricky because
with the exception of Tachyon (which I can modify any way I want, though
I prefer not to do "ugly" things to it), all other packages will require
VMD to export the 3-D texture data in a supplementary file or files.
This breaks the model that VMD has been using for communicating with
external renderers for a long time, as the current system assumes that
the scene can be fully described with a single output file. In order to
handle 3-D texture mapping, I'm going to have to make changes to the
rendering interface in VMD, and adapt it to generating complete sets of
scene files. This will probably require breaking backwards compatibility
with the old rendering commands, so I wasn't ready to jump into this just
yet. For Tachyon I could make an exception and teach Tachyon to read
3-D texture data inline within the scene description file, so it's reasonable
to expect to see 3-D texturing in Tachyon soonest, since I don't have to
solve the VMD side of the problem in order to get it working in Tachyon.

  John

On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 04:53:02PM +0100, Jérôme Hénin wrote:
> On Wednesday 16 February 2005 11:19, Vlad Cojocaru wrote:
> > Dear VMD users,
> > I use the new 1.8.3 VMD and APBS to calculate electrostatic
> > potentials. I noticed that when I tried to render the colored MSMS
> > surface with Tachyon the resulting picture was white!. Rendering using
> > snapshot works fine.
> > On another notice, is there a way to see colorbars and render them
> > in VMD?
> > Cheers
> > vlad
>
> For the time being, VMD does not export 3d texture data to "external"
> renderers (including TachyonInternal).
> If I remember correctly, not all of them implement 3d texturing in the first
> place. In the case of Tachyon, I think John planned to implement a way for
> VMD to export the volumetric data, but it looked like it would require a
> significant amount of work.
>
> Cheers,
> Jerome
>
> --
> Jérôme Hénin
> Equipe de Dynamique des Assemblages Membranaires
> Université Henri Poincaré / CNRS
> Tel : (33) 3 83 68 43 95 Fax : (33) 3 83 68 43 71
> http://www.edam.uhp-nancy.fr/ 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
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Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
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